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Flicks - Ulysses' Gaze An epic about a filmmaker searching for the first film shot in the Balkans is a parable of the tragic struggles and sufferings of the Balkan countries. by Chris Dashiell - The Film Snob In Ulysses' Gaze, a 1995 film by Greek director Theo Angelopoulos, Harvey Keitel plays a Greek-born film director who returns from self-imposed exile in America to show his latest picture, only to see the film shut down by protesting religious groups. When he catches wind of a mystery—three missing reels of film by the famous Manaki brothers, considered the earliest cinema shot in the Balkans—he decides to find the film. The rest of the film concerns his wanderings through Greece, Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Serbia, in search of the elusive footage.
Angelopoulos, a dominant figure in Greek cinema, chooses the rambling, epic form to explore a subject larger than most directors would think of tackling. In this case, it's the history of the Balkan countries, their long suffering under communist regimes, and the tragedy of their fragmentation after the fall of the Soviet bloc. The missing reels represent the act of memory itself, which the director sees as an instrument of redemption. The Keitel character's search for this missing film, therefore, is a quest for the recovery of the Balkan soul through art. It strains his faculties to the limit, to the point of desperation and even loss of mental balance. The rough parallel to the wanderings of Ulysses amounts to a device for highlighting various experiences and incidents of heightened awareness in the different Balkan countries.
The choice of the well-known Keitel in the lead role, criticized by many as being inauthentic, was, in my view, a very shrewd move. Keitel bravely employs the hardness of his persona to convey the nameless director's struggle with his own roots, his resistance to the fragility that seems to have doomed the landscapes through which he travels. The film's finest set-piece is a meditation on time and death that occurs in the home of the director's parents in Constanza, on the Black Sea. The now middle-aged man played by Keitel, steps back in time and encounters his mother, who takes him to the family New Year's Eve party at their home. Eventually the camera takes a stationary viewpoint of the main hall where the guests are dancing. From this point of view, we witness three different New Year's Eve parties covering five years, years in which the family (and by extension, their city) is shattered by the intrusion of the police, who arrest members of the family for subversion and force the rest into exile. The sequence is executed with great technical mastery—figures appear and disappear within the frame, but the action as a whole appears as if uncut. The viewer only gradually realizes what is happening, and is then confronted with emotions both intimate and terrifying.
The picture is very long, and visually stunning. Erland Josephson shows up eventually as a film curator in Sarajevo, a mysterious figure who seems to hold the key to the missing film. The ending is both tragic and enigmatic. With Ulysses' Gaze, Theo Angelopoulos has produced a three-hour national epic of art, history, and memory--flawed yet admirable in its sweep. It's available on DVD.
[Note to readers: the evening after I recorded this review, I discovered that Mr. Angelopoulos had died the day before, at the age of 76.]